School Board Faces Choice of Starkly Different Visions

Spurned by one school superintendent finalist, the Los Angeles Board of Education was left Wednesday to choose between two candidates with dramatically different views of the shortcomings of public education.

The clear front-runner, Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias, sees things through the eyes of an educator: the problem lies with inadequate teacher training and requires infusing resources first into the 100 lowest-performing schools. Following the pullout of Long Island regional Supt. Daniel Domenech on Tuesday, the 31-year district veteran is the sole candidate with the educational expertise to carry out that agenda.

Zacarias’ remaining competitor, former banker William E.B. Siart, has a businessman’s perspective: the district’s chief problem is a convoluted bureaucracy that cries out for cutting away the layers of management between regional school administrators and the superintendent. His chief credential for such reorganization is his work at First Interstate Bancorp, where he was chief executive officer.

The job the two men seek demands radical action. The next superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District must ward off breakup advocates with quick antidotes to perceptions that tax dollars produce only failing students and a bloated bureaucracy.

The proposals by Siart and Zacarias are each just part of that puzzle, the yin and yang of the district’s cure.

Both candidates are so keenly aware that their contribution meets only some of the district’s needs that they have created jobs in their imaginary cabinets for someone just like the other. Siart would turn to educators for academic advice and Zacarias would turn over the business operations of the district to a business czar.

That tactic has left the school board yearning to hire both--Zacarias in the top job and Siart as his deputy--and thus dodge the difficult chore of choosing just one of those visions. They plan to make that pitch during separate closed-door meetings today with Zacarias and Siart, who reiterated Wednesday his lack of interest in taking a deputy-level post.

Looking beneath the surface, however, there are possibilities, flaws and warnings embedded in both men’s plans and the claims they use to bolster them.

The Business of Schools

Zacarias’ proposal for breaking off business functions--such as purchasing, computerization and the district’s financial wing--into a separate division is hardly new. Just three years ago, the district hired businessman William H. Magee for the new job of business and finance czar.

Magee, who had taken early retirement from Atlantic Richfield Co., was hired into the specially created No. 3 position, under Zacarias and Supt. Sid Thompson, who is set to retire at the end of June. He was charged with streamlining the business and budget operations.

The appointment followed a scathing outside audit of the district, which called for combining six major business divisions under one head, who would report to the superintendent.

Whether Zacarias would go that far remains unclear, as he has provided few details and did not return telephone calls Wednesday.

And whether his plan would work is an even bigger question. Magee hit a wall of bureaucracy and resigned just five months into his one-year contract, saying he had not been given the hiring and firing authority necessary to do the job. He was never replaced.

Today, Magee said his quick departure is not a reason to keep business duties within the superintendent’s purview.

“It’s clear to me that the only way . . . to manage the business functions of the LAUSD is if they do appoint somebody that’s knowledgeable to run them, because the superintendent of schools doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of trying to keep up with them,” he said. “It’s equally clear that the person that’s going to run it has got to have authority over the people that work for them.”

Furthermore, Magee recommended that whoever is hired be allowed to bring in a team of colleagues, because otherwise underlings “will yes you to death and then go their merry way.”

Magee, whose name has been floated by some board members as a possible candidate for the job, said he would consider taking his old job back, but only under the right conditions.

“Life is too short to do impossible jobs,” he said.

In analyzing the school system’s structure, Siart also drew the conclusion that separating business functions might make sense, but that wouldn’t be his answer to administrative clutter.

Were he to be chosen to head the district, Siart envisions having all 27 leaders of regional school groupings known as “clusters” report directly to the superintendent, instead of the current three-tiered structure (they report to five administrators who report to the deputy superintendent, who reports to the superintendent).

To make room in the school chief’s schedule for that duty, Siart said he would group the dozen other administrative divisions--ranging from finance to computers--under three senior officers.

“If you want to talk about specifics, you have to talk about less layers between you and the places you want to make the most difference,” he said.

If Siart is such a highly regarded manager, why did his First Interstate Bancorp come out the loser in the takeover battle with Wells Fargo & Co.?

On one hand, Wall Street analysts say that if the job of a CEO is to bring value to his shareholders, Siart delivered in spades.

Though he cannot take full credit for the company’s five-year rise in value from $2 billion to $13 billion, since he only held the top job for one of those years, during the time he was chief executive, First Interstate’s stock climbed 153%, from $68.625 to $173.50.

Still, First Interstate was vulnerable to takeover in part because Wells Fargo had its economic house in even better order when the battle was joined. Both banks had been badly weakened by the real estate crash of the early 1990s, but Wells Fargo was quicker to right itself.

Siart was a key member of the executive team that turned First Interstate around after bad real estate loans threatened to ruin the bank in the early 1990s.

Banking analysts credit him with centralizing control of an ungainly collection of nearly autonomous banks in a dozen states, saying he instituted consistent marketing and lending standards that cut across state lines, and in the process sharply reduced administrative costs.

That performance is what Siart’s supporters see as the asset he could bring to the district.

“First Interstate was a multi-headed, multifaceted institution with tremendous geographic and people diversity to deal with, and Bill helped make it into a cohesive unit,” said Fred B. White III, a New York lawyer who advised First Interstate during the Wells fight.

Fixing Bad Schools

Though strong on organizational issues, Siart has been less clear about how he would improve schools. His main thrust has been a proposal for issuing quarterly report cards to every parent, thus increasing public pressure for change.

Conversely, Zacarias’ more specific pledge--to single out the 100 worst schools for immediate attention--is merely an echo of stronger vows taken by many other big-city superintendents.

His effort would begin, he has said, with asking the principals of those poor-performing schools to produce an analysis of what is wrong and how they intend to fix it. He tried that a decade ago as a regional superintendent on the Eastside and claims it resulted in demotions of six principals--a record impossible to check because he declined to identify the individuals.

Teachers union President Day Higuchi, who was a teacher on the Eastside when Zacarias was in charge, recalled that he did move some principals and demote others, but could not recall any details.

In the deputy job, Higuchi said Zacarias has not distinguished himself as a bold leader, making it difficult to predict how he would perform as superintendent.

The third finalist--Domenech, who pulled out of the race on Tuesday, saying he was tired of waiting for a board decision--was the only one with a recent track record in radical school overhaul. Nearly two years ago he was sent in by the state of New York to engineer that state’s first takeover of a small minority district on Long Island.

His experiences there illustrate what a stiff spine Zacarias will need if he intends to move quickly to fix the district’s worst schools.

No one denied that Long Island’s Roosevelt Union Free District was in bad shape. At the lone junior-senior high school, bathrooms were rife with backed-up sewage and five principals had come and gone in just two years. Only four seniors had graduated that spring with New York’s Regents’ diplomas, which requires students to pass college-prep exams.

Although there have been improvements since the takeover--newly painted walls, operational plumbing and more than 300 students passing the college-prep exams last year--Domenech’s critics attribute them to the school’s dynamic new principal.

“You don’t get any adulation from the community in these situations,” Domenech said.

Perhaps the most notable example of rigorous intervention in troubled schools is the rocky path traveled by Boston Supt. Thomas Payzant. Payzant left his job as assistant U.S. secretary of education in 1995 and within five months ordered all Boston’s principals to write a 500-word schools vision essay.

A month later, he fired six principals--out of a total principal staff of 125--and put another two dozen on notice. The response was mixed. Other principals were furious, feeling he had rushed to judge their colleagues. The teachers union remained neutral. Some parents even picketed.

Since then, most of those fired have filed suit and some still work for the system.

But the public at large was ecstatic.

Payzant said a 1993 Massachusetts state law gives him power a California superintendent does not have: complete hiring and firing authority, with no requirement that those decisions be approved by a school board.

Nonetheless, his advice to anyone else embarking on such a plan is to move quickly, during what he calls “the superintendent’s honeymoon period.”

“You can do some things in the first few months that you will not have the opportunity to do if you wait even eight months or a year,” Payzant said. “Send some signals about change real fast.”

Times staff writer Peter Y. Hong contributed to this story.